HTC’s Hero looks like the best Android phone yet

Just days after T-Mobile announced the new myTouch 3G, its second Android phone, manufacturer HTC, which makes the device, unveiled the HTC Hero, yet another Android device that looks even better than the myTouch.

HTC apparently is betting hard on Android, the mobile operating system from Google, and the latest results look impressive. I wasn’t at the launch event in London, but details and information coming out of it make for a device that looks like a great competitor to the iPhone and Palm Pre.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Hero’s got real Adobe Flash support. It’s not Flash 10, which will come out later this year, but it gives you full Internet video, dynamic ads and access to thousands of Flash games. This is a first for an Android phone and among the first for any phone.

The Hero has a thing called HTC Sense, which allows you to personalize your home page and set up profiles for work, weekends or just play. You can also organize more content according to the people in your life. From your contacts list you can see what messages you’ve exchanged with that person, their Facebook updates and their Flickr photos.

There are also little touches meant to surprise. If you want to silence an incoming call, just turn the phone over. You can call by just typing a person’s initials. When you pull up weather in a certain place where it’s raining, rain drops fall on your screen.

The phone itself appears handsome with a teflon coating to ward off fingerprints. There’s no keyboard, just a virtual one like the myTouch that appears on the 3.2 inch 320×480 HVGA screen. With dimensions of 4.41 x 2.21 x 0.57 inches, it’s almost the same size as the myTouch but it’s got an angled chin, similar to the G1.

Inside, the phone sports a 528 MHz processor with 288MB of RAM. It’ll have a 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, GPS, a digital compass, a 3G talk time of 7 hours, support for 7.2 Mbps HSPA and a microSD card slot.

The Hero will appear in Europe first in July and in Asia later this summer. A specific North American version will be available later this year. Pricing was not available.